The trendy five: Trending GitHub repos for August 2018 include adorable robots and a blast from the past

It’s time! What are our picks from GitHub’s trending list? August 2018 had some serious contenders and game-changers. Let’s hear it for the winners.

Every month, we take a look at trending GitHub repos and choose our favorites. Whether they’re innovative, interesting, or just downright strange, we highlight five that caught our interest here at JAXenter.com.

August 2018 packed some serious heat, and it was tough to narrow down the list of repos. In no particular order, here are our picks!

Proton

It may not be a new Portal or Half-Life, but Valve showed that they can still crank out the creations.

Proton is a compatibility tool for Steam Play based on Wine. It is used with the Steam client to allow Windows exclusive games to run on Linus and macOS systems.

GitHub has everything to need to make gaming on Linux machines easier. Currently, both gaming communities and the tech sector buzz with discussion about the of Proton and what this means for the Microsoft-dominated PC gaming world.

Open source rover

So, maybe you won’t be picked by Mars One to go and set up a space colony. But you can do the next best thing – build your own rover. NASA’s build-it-yourself, 6-wheel rover is based on the Mars rover model, currently 33.9 million miles away.

You’ll need more than a few materials to do this (including an Xbox controller and a Raspberry Pi), as well as a working knowledge of electronics, machining skills, and access to a 3D printer. All together, the project’s estimate costs around $2,500 USD and around 200 hours to build.

But, if you can manage, you’ll have your own Bluetooth controlled 25 pound rover with a max speed of 6.7 inches per second. Plus, it’s adorable!

Source: github.com/nasa-jpl/open-source-rover

Windows 95 in Electron

Don’t give up that nostalgia. Thanks to Felix Rieseberg, we now have Windows 95 in Electron. It runs on macOS, Linux, and of course, Windows. Felix Rieseberg wrote on Twitter, “…It’s a terrible idea that works shockingly well. I’m so sorry.”

This is not a madman’s dream, the code actually works. All your favorite old programs like Minesweeper and MSPaint run. Based on v86 by Copy, this project proves that the classics never die.

Bonus: Now there’s even floppy disk support. There are currently a few broken features, but yes, it does run Doom.

Filament

Google’s at it again, this time they’ve open sourced a rendering engine for Android, Windows, Linux, and macOS. Filament is small yet efficient, and can render different material models in real-time.

Some of the features available are translucent materials, cloth shading, anisotropic lighting, metallic workflow, and temporal dithering. Future additions plan to include fog, area lights, color grading, IES light profiles, and bloom.

The samples are highly impressive:

Source: github.com/google/filament

If you’re interested in the nuts and bolts behind computer graphics, I highly suggest looking at Filament’s documentation. To call it thorough is an understatement, prepare to learn more than you ever thought possible about computer graphics.

Lazygit

How many great innovations were born out of sheer laziness? (Microwavable burritos, I’m looking at you.) Are you too lazy to type every single git command into the terminal? Jesse Duffield created Lazygit: a simple terminal UI for git commands.

Some features of Lazygit include: easy file additions, quick pushing and pulling, scroll through logs/diffs of branches/commits/stash, and resolve merge conflicts. It is still a work in progress, including some updated code quality, but we look forward to seeing Lazygit receive some polish. (As a bonus, you can even watch Jesse Duffield stream his programming on Twitch.)

Sarah Schlothauer is an assistant editor for JAXenter.com. She received her Bachelor's degree from Monmouth University and is currently enrolled at Goethe University in Frankfurt, Germany where she is working on her Masters. She lives in Frankfurt with her husband and cat.